We are who we tell ourselves we are. We are who we are at exactly this moment in time, and we are also every memory that has brought us to this point. And as philosopher and historian Noga Arikha explains in her new book "The Ceiling Outside: The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind," our very awareness — of ourselves and of the world — is fluctuating, even at the best of times. We feel as much as we think. It's a mutable thing, this sense of self, and we are not always our own best historians.
Arikha, who previously wrote "Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humors," picked a poignant time to investigate the complexities of experience, identity, and the concept of interoception — our physical and emotional senses of self-awareness. While Arikha was studying the mysterious conditions of a group of patients in a Paris hospital's neuropsychiatry unit, her mother, the poet Anne Atik, was meanwhile navigating through her own experience of dementia. What unfolded was a quest that became deeply personal, a firsthand account of how, as Arikha says, "we take our memory for granted, until an aspect of it breaks down."
